Exploring A Devastated World: Emil Pagliarulo And Fallout 3

You looked at a pretty wide spectrum of DLC size with Oblivion, and you seem to have decided on somewhere towards the bigger end -- but not on the upper end of that direction.

EP: Yeah, well, we looked at what we'd done before, with something as small as horse armor and something as big as The Shivering Isles, we realized that actually production pipeline-wise and success-wise, the Knights of the Nine expansion we did for Oblivion was a good model for us.

Shivering Isles was a major project, and horse armor was -- well, we were one of the first people to do DLC, so it was an experiment.

We used the Knights of the Nine model of small, well-priced, additional quests with new stuff. Look at Operation: Anchorage -- four, five hours of gameplay. People criticized it.

It is linear, it is more action-based, and it doesn't have the role-playing stuff. We knew that. We knew some people wouldn't like it. It was a conscious decision for us.

But we don't want to do the same stuff. We wanted to do something different and use our tools to put people in the snow and give them a different type of experience. You get a quest and you get new weapons. We're not selling that stuff parceled out. We feel like we're giving the player a full package.

One thing I remember people liking about Shivering Isles was that it brought a really different visual setting into the game, with the two split environments. It sounds like Operation: Anchorage had partially a similar goal.

EP: Yeah, it does. It depends on the genre you're working in. In Oblivion, when you have a game where you can include the Plane of Madness, there are a lot of creative liberties you can take there. In Fallout, using the virtual simulator technology was our gateway to that. It's the weird stuff.

But we don't want to overdo that.

Right -- "Now, here's the lava level!"

EP: Exactly. At first, we had talks like, "Should every DLC be the simulation?" But we decided no, because you want to bring new stuff back with you. You want a new experience in the world.

The Pitt DLC is a good example. We thought, "So, this is what D.C. looks nuked. What does everything else look like? Maybe we can explore that. Maybe this place has a little more vegetation. Maybe there's some old scrapyard over there." It's been fun.

It must be an interesting and unique experience, but also a potentially limiting one, to have your game basically set in an alternative version of the area your office is located in -- "What crazy thing could we modify from our familiar surroundings?"

EP: Yeah. But with Fallout, it's not completely grounded in reality. There is the tinge of madness there. We can always go out in the weeds a little bit, and then there's the whole 50s pulp thing we can explore. There were a lot of avenues for us to look at. But the Pitt seemed really natural, because we had talked about it in the base game.

And thematically, The Pitt plays a lot more on the shades of gray. We explored moral ambiguity a little bit in the base game, but we were just starting to get a feel for it.

I think as we wrapped up production, we thought, "We understand this now. We get it, and we want to do it." In The Pitt, it's much more, "What is good and what is evil, and which line do I walk?"